So I'm having a great day in the support hell that I signed up for under the guise of "Systems Programmer". And I have come to a very important conclusion - caffeine does not cause me to blow my lid and become a seething mass of sarcasm and bitterness.

No, it's the job that's causing that.

Really, I expect better from our Gracious Academics, of whom we should be grateful to even have the privilege of working with. (Hmm. The HTML specification needs a "<sarcasm>" element.) I expect that any computing academic should have at least the problem solving abilities to determine that his computer gives an error when attempting to mount a floppy disk when there is no floppy disk in the drive.

Once we tackle those smaller issues, perhaps we could move onto the bigger ones - the ones where the system is obviously broken because they get undefined references when compiling, regardless of the fact that they're not linking to the required libraries, or even including the relevant header files (in some cases). Basic programming skills seem to be lost on these people. I do not understand it.

But it's my own fault. I naively accepted the job of Systems Programmer expecting the position to live upto it's name, somewhat. After months of struggle trying to perform all the helpdesk stuff in addition to some programming projects, and formulating strategies to better the IT situation within the department, it dawned on me that one of the reasons they had such large problems with the suggestions I was putting forward is because they see me, and my position, as nothing more than junior hell desk. This is further reinforced by the responsibility breakdown that we determined.

Talk about a slap to the face. On multiple counts.